Lexile Leveling of Libraries

Someone might actually want some viewpoint on actual library practices. Any humor associated with this selection is purely coincidental and of the reader's perception. After doing this every Friday for the major part of this school year, I am not sure I have any humor available on the subject of Lexile scores and school libraries.

If an administrator tells you to lexile level the library, you should run like hell. If there is any chance that someone will listen to you, read the following considerations and try to redirect the administrator before investing time and money on the project. I am posting this information because I remember being a new hire, and having teachers come into the school library with all kinds of expectations that I did not know how to prioritize or accomplish. I remember very clearly going home in tears a few times. Fortunately, I had a great administrator with a very clear and appropriate idea of what was possible for someone to accomplish in the last few months of school for which I had come on board. Not all administrators understand library work.

If I were a new hire with little or no library experience, and someone asked me to lexile level a school library, I would not know how to start this process, and no pool of experienced volunteers would be rushing over to take on the job.

First of all, I do this in response to a request rather than a goal of my own and not because I consider it appropriate for school libraries.

Process: Some, but not many, books have lexile levels mentioned in their MARC records. If the lexile level is not in the MARC record, you can go to lexile.com, and look it up.

Observations on lexile.com: You need to do various searches to know for sure that the book is not in their database. You can search by using author, title, or series within quotation marks. Searching by one of these and not finding the item does not guarantee you that it is in there. You can search by isbn but if the title has been published without alteration under another isbn you won't find it.
How did lexile come up with those scores? Either the whole book or only portions of the book from the beginning, middle, and end were scanned, and if you want to do that yourself, there is a whole section on how to do it which involves the scanning the book or portions of it, and the scanning being in the right format, and conversions made. I think most of us are not going to be that ambitious.
Basically, the database was put together probably by many hands, and occasionally you find typos of author names and titles, and probably how the information was entered determines how easily a successful search proceeds. Sometimes you just find scores that don't make much sense when you compare a book to some other book with a similar score. Certain books are unlikely to show up because of their format: little or no punctuation, poetry, or graphic novels. Some of these have designations NP, BR, GR . You must take into consideration if the book you are trying to level is an abridged title or the author's original work. A title which includes a lengthy introduction to a classic work for older grades may have a lexile score that measures the introduction as well as the literary work. Older titles that are less popular now are less likely to be in the database. In general, multi-syllabic words frequency results in higher Lexile scores for titles.

Authors and publishers may have made a decision to put the book through the analysis and include it in the database. I do not know if they pay for this service. It might help them to market the books, if lots of schools look at lexile scores in the classroom or the library.

Preparation for Lexile-Leveling of the Library: If, after contemplating everything stated here, you still want to lexile a library, the very first thing you should do is weed, weed, weed. If you have a lot of old materials that are not in great shape, you should get rid of them for all the usual reasons plus the fact that you will probably not find them on lexile.com. I am not saying that you should weed everything for which a lexile level is unavailable. You will need to estimate time and costs. See the later comments.

What you will find as you proceed: You are going to have books with lexile scores and books without lexile scores. Some books without lexile scores will have reading grade level information in the MARC records. There many be more than one system of reading grade level and a range can be stated. ( Reading grade level and reading grade interest are not the same. Zoos may be of reading interest to kindergartners, but if the reading grade level is 9th grade, there is a mis-match.)
You might find yourself with a library with proportions such as 1/3 with lexile scores, 1/3 with grade level scores, and 1/3 without any reading grade level. The proportions could be completely different.

You will be sorting these out, and relabeling every book in the library if you want to find and reshelve these items as easily as possible, which will be a much more difficult process than with a traditional library system. Forget about elementary school children shelving, and adults will need a lot of familiarity with all the different sections in existence to be effective.. I am keeping the picture books and emergent readers together in one area, split out into the three groups of reading score possibilities ( lexile, non-lexile reading level, and no level at all), and books will be on shelves within their hundred periodicity (all the books with lexiles in the 500 range are together, not to be confused with a Dewey Decimal range of 500).

I don't want all the non-lexile scored books to be thrown away, so I use the reading grade levels to give some information. Some of the titles which will not have a lexile score or will be labeled NP will be a lot of the Dr. Seuss titles.

The whole set up has to be carried out in the non-fiction and fiction chapter books as well.

New spine labels must be made for everything with some sort of reading grade level, the shelves relabeled, and the books sorted out and shelved. Making new spine labels will mean scanning each barcode, entering the record, typing the lexile or reading level into each barcode before they can be printed. Printing the spine labels will mean scanning the barcodes to print the sheets of spine labels. Once you have the labels, it is easiest with the non-fiction to scan the barcodes again to assure you apply the correct label to the book. This is not a process to hand over to volunteer parents. Locating books that are shelved in so many sections according to type of reading score and by Dewey Decimal number within score ranges of non-fiction is going to be difficult even with the labels being applied to the correct books.

This means you will want to know how much money you need to spend to print all these spine labels (at this point, I am estimating a minimum of $500 for my 7,000 plus books), cover them with label protectors, and redo your shelf labels. You'll need to estimate the amount of time to do this, and I would say for about 7,000 books is a small library that has already been weeded, that you need to allow a minimum of 3 months full-time. This is an estimate, as I am still in the process, and progressing but not yet done. If you work in an environment where the internet connection goes down or the library is being using physically for something else that precludes you working, it will be longer.

What a child will see in the lexiled library: While school staff may be excited at the prospect of quickly guiding a child to sections of books at their current reading level, what the child might see is a relatively small number of books on a few shelves from which they are allowed to choose. Reading within a range is definitely limiting if strict adherence is the policy. Personally, I think the library is no longer a child-centered library under this regiment.

I do think lexile-leveling the fiction chapter books has some utility, especially if you have a good sized collection at a middle school, but I would not lexile level the non-fiction in a middle school. Most of the non-fiction has a score of a 1000 or higher. A future increased focus on reading skills in non-fictional format cannot bypass the fiction collection because the fiction books usually have a wider range of reading levels with which students can improve on their lexile level competency.

Shopping for New Books: Now you can select books with lexile scores, but you will be excluding many fine books just because they aren't in the lexile database. The books with lexile scores do not necessarily meet state standards nor are they guaranteed to be quality titles.

The public library is not going to have their books lexile-leveled, and they will not have the staff to be looking up the scores on many books, in case your staff or parents ask.

Cheer up. If you cannot talk them out of this library trend, things never last very long in education, and three years from now you, or someone else, will be putting it back the way it used to be.

This was written on Tuesday to post before Friday, when I will be learning about constructing webpages for the library homepage at Professional Development. I promise to not mention lexiling again. I know for many of you I am preaching to the choir and you are bored to tears, but someone needs to do disclosure about what this request involves.